Octopus Books is proud to announce the publication of the 5th and 6th full-length poetry titles in our catalog. Both books are now available for $12 (free shipping) on our website here.
Poems should go to where we think, which means that they often end up in the loneliest, most impossible places. (California'll do, but there are others.) Once, when I was a little kid, I burned my hand with our car's cigarette lighter while my mom was busy paying for the gas she'd just pumped. I remember the meaty stench, the little crop circle in my palm, but mostly I remember wanting badly to know a thing, a thing that sped off as quickly as it came, maybe quicker. Claire Becker's poems seem both driven by that impulse and in love with that result. They've got a throb at which it's hard not to wonder and, like more than one of us, an aching oddball soul—Graham Foust.
I can't remember when a book of poems has invited such an attentive reading as Cindy King's marvelous first volume, People are Tiny in Paintings of China. Each poem, a descent through shifting strata of syntax and history, requires a sustained renegotiation of one's balance in language and the world. As I read I had the feeling of launching myself from an opening line and falling past gorgeous and complex surfaces, an intricate landscape of experience, until landing on the solid earth of the final lines of these extraordinary poems. People are Tiny in Paintings of China is a work of uncommon talent—Lynn Emanuel.
6 full-length titles including books by Heather Christle, Rebecca Farivar, Jenny Zhang, and Christopher DeWeese and 4 limited-edition chapbooks.
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